Of Hope And Commitment

The Efforts, Burdens And Rewards Of One Manhattan Teacher

May 27, 1990|By Reviewed by Robert Coles, A child psychiatrist who teaches at Harvard University and is the author of the forthcoming ``The Spiritual Life of Children``.

Small Victories

By Samuel G. Freedman

Harper & Row, 431 pages, $22.95

We have in recent years heard much that is disheartening about our inner- city schools-the high truancy and dropout rates, the failure of many children to get an adequate education. Our social scientists, our politicians, our journalists, continue to spell out the nature of such educational problems, and soon enough, many of us shrug our shoulders pessimistically, conclude that for one reason or another there is little that can be done.

Yet how many of those who recite their statistical findings or exhort us, warn us, have actually taken the time, day after day, to witness first-hand how it goes in our schools-exploring the challenges, the obstacles, the frustrations that conscientious teachers must face and learning, too, about the achievements of those teachers, no matter the high odds against them and their students?

It is the considerable virtue of this book that its author, Samuel Freedman, a one-time reporter for the Chicago Tribune and The New York Times, has put in months and months in a particular New York City high school-been part, really, of the lives of a determined, energetic, gifted teacher, her colleagues and her many students. The result is a book of major significance in the documentary tradition-an observer`s account of the success and failures that take place in the classrooms of a school located deep within a neighborhood all too readily dismissed as a ghetto by those of us who live in far more comfortable neighborhoods.

The central protagonist is Jessica Siegel, an English teacher at Seward Park High School in Manhattan`s lower East Side. She comes from a well-to-do New Jersey family, her father a doctor. She attended the University of Chicago, then worked for a number of years as a journalist. She came to inner- city teaching out of a passionate interest in this nation`s serious social problems, but just as important, in response to her own natural interest in children, her reponsiveness to them as a person as well as an educator. Indeed, a particular teacher once made an enormous difference to her as she grew up, and the memory of that experience obviously means a lot still, decades later.

The heart of this book is its evocation of one long school year-Jessica Siegel getting to know her students in September and Jessica Siegel saying goodby to them the following June. Much takes place in between, and the author is resourceful and adept in giving us a careful chronicle of how it goes, class after class, for this one teacher, for those whose teaching lives connect with hers and for the high school youths whom she meets and gets to know rather wonderfully well. They are young men and women dealt a bad hand by life-from poor black and poor Spanish-speaking families, from poor Asian-American families, from families struggling not only with poverty but also with illnesses of various kinds, from families overcome at times by despair yet also, one slowly realizes, ready at times to take on the world with considerable pluck.

The author wants us to know well both those families and the teacher of their children, and he tries a variety of narrative techniques to accomplish that task. He takes us right into Siegel`s classroom, gives us her and the children as they struggle to grasp one or another subject-the definition of words, the way sentences are put together, the meaning of certain assigned books. But we are taken elsewhere, as well-to the homes of certain children, even to the countries where they were born: China and the Dominican Republic. We are given exceptionally compelling descriptions of the neighborhoods where these children live, and the social history of those neighborhoods over the generations. Not least in importance, we journey through the administrative offices of a major city`s school system. And we realize thereby that the difficulties teachers face are not only brought to them by their students but also bear down heavily upon them by virture of the stifling, deadly phenomenon called in the abstract ``bureaucracy`` but conveyed here in all its concrete absurdity-as it is experienced by a teacher, and through her, by school children.

The great strength of ``Small Victories`` is the author`s vivid, powerful prose, which he harnesses to a series of portraits and to certain unforgettable scenes: these youngsters, for instance, reflecting shrewdly, even eloquently, on ``The Great Gatsby``; or a handful of would-be college students traveling with their teacher by car (a desperate race against a 4:30 p.m. deadline) for admissions interviews at an upstate New York college; or a struggle to put together the high school newspaper against all sorts of obstacles. One thereby learns about a certain world, but one also feels in the middle of a dramatic, compelling story that offers strong character portrayal, much that is funny as well as sad and a good deal to think about at the end.